Home > Consumer Reviews > Kenwood In-Dash CD Player with MP3 Capability (KDCMP8017)

I bought this unit on an impulse and did the research afterwards. Fortunately, I think I made a pretty good choice. Once you've had an MP3 deck in your car, you'll never go back to an ordinary CD player. You can put at least 10 albums on one disk. The sound quality is indistinguishable from the original, at least to my ears. Here are my small complaints:

The display is poorly designed. The unit can only display one thing at a time. So if the clock is display, no song titles or radio station information. That makes the clock pretty useless. If the song title is display, no track or elapsed time info.

The unit can only do random selection within a folder.

You have to flip down the faceplate to change CD's. Kind of a nuisance.

I have been using the KDC-MP8017 for several months. It installed flawlessly, and except for a smudged CDR it has played all the CDRs I've given it. There are two major problems that have me shopping for a new player now. 1) The fast-forward and rewind for MP3s is useless. Near as I can tell, holding the REW button down for ten seconds rewinds only five seconds. There is no time indicator when you FF or REW an MP3. I use FF and REW when listening to language CDs. 2) The folder navigation appears broken, or buggy at best. I organized a CDR by genre using different folders and the folder navigation sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. Sometimes the player appears to lock up (a minutes passes and nothing happens), and I have to eject the CD and start over. I've read the manual a couple times, but I cannot consistenly get folder navigation to work. Perhaps it's cockpit error, but I think I'm pretty technically savvy (installed the receiver myself, burned the CDRs myself, fix other peoples' computer problems... you get the idea), and this has been sadly frustrating.

So, the bottom line is I want to replace it, and I'm avoiding Kenwood. I'm thinking the Blaupunkt MP3000 looks attractive....